K i tnes

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contribution o f b o d y w o r k to
somatic education
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T.W. Myers

Introduction

Thomas W. Myers
20 Roundabout Dr, Scarborough
ME 04074, USA

Correspondence to: 32 W. Myers.

TeL/Fax: + I 207 883 2756; E-mail: kinesis@ime.net
Received June 1998
Accepted July 1998

Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies (1999)

3(2), 107-116
Harcourt Brace & Co. Ltd 1999

In Part 1 of this series, (Myers 1998a),

we gave the name 'kinesthetic
dystonia' to the ubiquitous loss of
kinesthetic sensitivity and somatic
connection we find in our tables and
plinths throughout industrialized
cultures. We explored aspects of the
bodyworker's role as a kinesthetic
educator, and posited that eventually
the discoveries made by one-on-one
healing would need to be applied in an
educational setting if we wish to effect
change in the abusmal universality of
somatic alienation.
In Part 2 (Myers 1998b), we
sketched a line through the history of
physical education (PE), the traditional
teachers of the kinesthetic sense,
exploring the 'fit' between cultures and
their approach to PE, with an eye to the
needs of the coming century. We also
expanded the scope of PE toward
'somatization' - - the process of
becoming embodied in any culture,
which allowed us to look beyond
traditional schooling to include both
early familial and general social effects

JOURNAL OF BODYWORK AND MOVEMENT

on this process of embodiment (Cohen

1993).
In Part 3A (Myers 1999) we began
to outline a PE agenda for the 21 st
century, using values derived from
bodywork and movement therapies.
Part 3A included a section on 'Total
movement'; Part 3B completes our
discussion with sections on 'Acture',
'Organismic response', and
'Kinesthetic sensitivity'.

Acture
Once again we must thank Dr
Feldenkrais, this time for this coined
word, acture, designating 'posture in
action' (Feldenkrais 1972). 'Posture' is
such a static concept, while structure is
constantly in action, even in standing.
There is a fairly stable and
recognizable pattern, however, in each
person's characteristic mode of action,
and this reveals itself in every action,
from shoveling to eating to simply
standing still. While the 'Total
movement' section described the
ability to move, voluntarily or
physiologically, the 'Acture' section

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Myers
describes values that bodywork
therapists hold in terms of the position
to which one returns after any
movement, and the underlying
relationships which persist in the
supporting parts of the body when any
action is undertaken.

Alignment
Achieving an easy, relaxed alignment
or the basic body segments in gravity
is a fimdamental body-mind
integration tool. While we can (and do)
argue among Rolf, Alexander,
Meziere, Aston, Iyengar, and many
other lesser luminaries about the
precise details of the ideal posture, the
basic value of alignment is so
unassailable that the wonder is that the
mainstream of our technocratic culture
has abandoned any technique for
inducing alignment. You have only to
go back as far as the Victorians to find
'deportment' classes in which children
were made to go round with books
perched on their heads, as a tool of
inducing correct alignment. Although
we have developed more effective and
less restrictive tools for bringing
alignment about, none of these is in
general use in schools today, and the
results are slouchingly evident outside
every secondary school in the Western
world (see box in Part 2 on 'Spiraling
Into Alignment' JBMT 2 (3).
'Gravity training' - teaching
children to find the center of gravity of
each body part, how to 'put themselves
together' in gravitational alignment,
and how to recapture that alignment
when it is lost - could usefully
substitute for the 'Pledge of
Allegiance' as a morning school
activity. If alignment was held as a
value during sports training, sports
careers might persist thanks to less
injury or degeneration. Carrying water
on the head, long practiced by native
women returning from the village well,
generates a sense of alignment, which
is a joy to behold.

Teaching alignment would include

gaining support from the ground,
which in turn requires an experiential
understanding of the body's 'core' and
'sleeve'. The body's core defies precise
anatomical definition, but could be
generally defined by imagining the
core of the body's 'apple': the spine,
and the muscles near the spine,
including the scalenes, diaphragm, and
pelvic floor, and as well the muscles
down the inside of the leg. The body's
sleeve, then, becomes most of those
muscles to be seen in the familiar
ecorch6 representation of the muscles:
the traps, lats, pects and delts, the
superficial abdominal muscles and the
outside of the legs.
The core is designed to gain support
from the ground up through the inside
of the legs and trunk, and the sleeve is
designed to hang off the sturdy core.
With no such training or even idea in
our educational system, however, few
people achieve this basic tenet of
alignment, and the two remain
unbalanced, generally with the core
'hanging' in the sleeve. Core
alignment and strength can be taught.

influenced many, including Mabel

Ellsworth Todd and Lulu Sweigard,
who taught a lengthened alignment in
expanded dance classes (Todd 1937,
Sweigard 1958). Both Todd and
Sweigard produced an extensive
working library of images and
exercises designed to promote a deep
sense of alignment and release into
length.
Releasing into length during
movement includes allowing the spine
to lengthen to initiate trunk movement,
allowing the scapula to drop down the
rib cage as the arm is lifted (instead of
hiking toward the ear), and letting the
femur drop out of the hip as the leg is
advanced (as opposed to shortening the
groin to flex the leg forward).
The grace and poise that comes
from moving through length could be
easily taught in 'kinesthesia class',
without belaboring the point or taking
an inordinate amount of time. The use
of a supervised climbing wall in school
situations could also make very plain
the value of being able to lengthen out
through the body.

Palintonicity
Length
That the body should be as long as
possible is an idea that originated with
E Matthias Alexander, and was
addressed in his seminal contribution,
the Alexander Technique (Alexander
1989). Some nods to length can be
found in yoga, and many people, such
as Ida Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais,
took up the flag in Alexander's wake.
In today's world, the idea of length
finds its only expression in the idea of
'stretching', which is all well and good
for the muscles, but can easily shorten
and compress the joints. It is a sad fact:
the idea that the body works better as it
lengthens away from the earth, giving
space to the joints, has yet to gain
much ground.
Inducing a lengthened position of
the body through class work was also
championed early this century by Else
Gindler (Gindler 1988). Her work

This neologism (Maitland 1995)

describes a state of even tone across
the various muscles and connective
tissues of our structural body. A
palintonic body has supple tone across
the various lines of pull of myofascia,
rather than having some areas of
hypertonicity coupled to other areas of
hypotonicity. A number of palintonic
lines have been described and their
interactions considered (Myers 1997).
Hatha yoga practice, modified
Iyengar practice in particular,
encourages palintonicity across the
planes of myofascia in the body. Also,
a good developmental movement
program, which encourages
recapitulation of development stages of
movement, would create the conditions
for palintonic balance in students.
A note here on modem exercise: the
shiny, crammed weight machines that
grace most health clubs these days

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Kinesthetic dystonia
were originally developed for
rehabilitation of specific damaged
muscles Their widespread use by the
general populace has probably done
more good than harm in health
promotion, but since these machines
are in fact carefully designed to isolate
particular muscles or groups, they can
get in the way of an even, balanced
tonus across an entire articular chain of
muscles. As an example, a leg-lifting
machine designed to develop only the
quadriceps, used to excess without
balancing exercises, can result in an
inhibition of the ability to extend the
hip joint. This could have deleterious
effects on pelvic posture and the tonus
of, say, the rectus abdominis and the
rest of the articular chain that runs
along the front of the body.
Combine alignment, length, and
palintonicity, and you assure
proportion. While the exact
dimensions of an ideal proportion have
been argued by sculptors and
geometers down through the ages from
Plato to Leonardo to modern
ergonomics, the general value of the
idea to somatic practice is obvious.
'Bodyreading' for proportion is a
quick and easy way in which teachers
could assess these somatic values in
their students - and, indeed, students
could learn to assess each other (and
even their parents). Lack of proportion
would be a flag for observers to
intervene in some way to restore
proportion before the compensation
pattern became too embedded for easy
restoration.
The body is a structure that depends
on the balance of tensional forces in
the soft tissues to maintain its balance.
Remove the soft tissues, and the
skeleton would clatter to the floor, for
it has no structural integrity of its own.
Despite the continued representation of
the musculoskeletal system in
textbooks as some kind of complex
crane, it is not. Kenneth Snelson
discovered, and Buckminster Fuller
developed, a class of structural models
which isolated compression beams
within a balanced ocean of tensional

members, which were dubbed

'tensegrity' structures (Fuller 1975).
Our human structure is a tensegrity
structure, and when the palintonic lines
that traverse and encircle the body are
balanced, 'length' and 'lift' appear
(Myers 1997, Schultz & Feitis 1996).
Recent writing in Scientific
American and JBMT show how the
tensegrity concept applies from the
atomic and molecular level, right
through the cellular level of the
cytoskeleton and its connections to the
fascial matrix which surrounds it, all
the way to the macro level of our body
structure (ingber 1998, Oschman
1997).

Efficient postural adjustments

All of the foregoing should result in
the ability of the body to make efficient
postural adjustments to changing
situations. A point of view articulated
particularly clearly by Judith Aston in
her Structural Patterning work, the
ability to change the inner pattern
easily and appropriately is very
important in our rapidly changing
environment.
A musician, a flautist for example,
has no choice but to adapt to her
instrument. The flute cannot change its
weight or shape or manner of being
played. Therefore the body has to
adapt, tilting the head to the right, with
the left arm carried to the right in
inward rotation, and the right arm
carrying the weight of the instrument
in outward rotation. Furthermore, this
position is maintained for many hours,
and, even more importantly, with
intense emotional concentration. The
tendency to maintain the posture after
the instrument has been put away is
very strong, and produces a fairly
predictable posture, with individual
variations, of course. The author
enjoyed a brief vogue with the London
Symphony Orchestra members, and
was able to surprise several clients with
'How long have you been playing the
(violin, flute, cello, bassoon)?', before
they had opened their mouths.

The trick of efficient postural

adjustment is to have, be able to find,
and actually employ, a neutral posture
to which we return after an activity.
The workman who stretches and
groans as he straightens up is the
simplest version, but it would be quite
possible to teach a fairly sophisticated
appreciation of one's own individual
neutral posture, and how to find it. For
instance, the author often pauses in the
airport concourse to readjust his body
into a good position for walking, the
poor thing having been shaped by an
aeroplane seat for the previous hours.
Besides instruments, car and 'plane
seats, and computer workstations, we
need to be cognisant of situations that
shape us emotionally, and be able to
reshape ourselves when the stress is
gone. This is of particular interest in
working just after the holiday season,
when so many clients return 'wearing'
the pattern they picked up during the
holiday visits to their family of origin.
This becomes a useful lesson for them
in restoring a more authentic pattern,
and in making an easy and conscious
transition from one pattern to the other.
It is important that, in the author's
opinion, we not try to impose a
'proper' posture, but that we facilitate
an easy adaptability.
This adaptability is based on the
building blocks of our innate righting
mechanisms, such as the labyrynthine,
Asymmetric Tonic Neck Reflex, and
the Landau reflexes, as evidenced by
developmental movement studies, and
employed so beautifully by Bonnie
Bainbridge Cohen in her Body-Mind
Centering work (Cohen 1993). In the
ideal world we are evoking here,
teachers of 'Kinesthetic Literacy'
classes would be able to recognize
when these righting mechanisms are
missing or out of order, and be able to
take the students through movement
sequences designed to restore or
awaken them.
While Judith Aston's work (and the
work of the Rolfing Movement
Integration teachers; Bond 1993), as
exemplified in the accompanying

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Myers
sidebar on the integrated use of the
spine, concentrates on making
conscious and cognitive postural
adjustments and adaptations, Cohen's
work involves seeing the underlying
unconscious righting mechanisms at
work below spontaneous movements.
Through thorough training,
practitioners can learn to recognize
where these basic building blocks of
good movement may be missing,
delayed, or not integrated, in order to
induce the proper mechanism through
subtle movement re-training.
A simple example from nearly
everyone's schooling is the postural
adjustment most of us make to our
standard issue desks. The author's
experience is echoed by many of his
clients: curled into whatever seat was
allocated for the alphabetical roll call,
our thoracic spines bent over the desk,
and when called upon, we raised only
our heads, putting a hyperextended
neck over the flexed spine. Desks that
are adjustable to the children, such as
posturally-efflcient orthopaedic seats,
would be wonderful, but are unlikely to
arrive soon, given current school
budgets. A brief lesson in adjusting
yourself to the chair and desk - finding
the comfortable seated posture, and
using the spine as a whole in moving in
a chair - is a cheaper alternative which
might divert a lifetime of habit breath
robbing (see Box 1).

Organismic response
The interface between the animal
within us and our beloved but
ephemeral conceptual world has
occupied philosophers for millennia.
While manual therapy certainly does
not have all the answers, it has
formulated a different set of questions
as well as the beginnings of an
approach to practical ways of
integrating body and soul, ego and id,
or reptilian brain and neocortex, name
the dramatis personae how you will.

Making friends with your animal

Living in an animal body in a
'civilized' society is a constant
compromise. Our inattention to, and
outright denial of, the animal nature at
the 'heart' of our soma is a profound
mistake at whose door can be laid huge
social problems and a large part of the
disease afflicting our population. First
championed this century by Wilhelm
Reich, the idea that we must find a
positive outlet for the animal drives
rather than repressing them in the
service of society is a profound one
with far-reaching implications for our
educational system (Reich 1949). So
much of our current social training is
involved in pushing down the innate
'selfish' animalism of the body, it is no
wonder that the joy and energy of the
soma get such short shrift, or that
physical manifestations of psychic
repression show up so often in the
doctors' offices and on our tables.
Physiologically, the see-saw balance
between the 'sympathetic' and the
'parasympathetic' branches of the
autonomic nervous system has t u n e d
into a tug-of-war between the
neuromuscular self and the visceral
self. The 'fight-or-flight' response
(which actually involves not only the
sympathetic nervous system, but the
entire neuropituitary-adrenal axis, or
'ergotropic' system; Gellhom 1964)
activates our moving self, priming the
newer neuromuscular body for action.
This chemical, neural, and psychic
charge is released by muscular action
(often fighting or running, but it could
be the sexual act or chopping wood
and carrying water), and the system
reverts to the 'rest-and-repair' side, the
parasympathetic system, or more
properly, according to Gellhorn, the
entire 'trophotropic' system.
The problem is that our systems
respond to both real and perceived
threats. Since we are far more sensitive
to our inner world than the outer one,
we are capable of creating imaginary
perceived threats to which there is no
conceivable physical response, or to

which an appropriate physical response

is out of the question as in the
following example.
If Mr X is in competition with Mr Y
for a higher position at the firm, he
cannot, as a chimpanzee or a baboon
might, thump Mr Y or beat him over
the head. If he did, he would satisfy his
own physiology, but he would not
achieve his aim - he would be out on
his ear or in jail. Instead, he can 'grin
and bear it', which does nothing to
dissipate the chemistry of sympathetic
arousal, or he can practice
'displacement behaviour' by smashing
a squash ball around, which will
dissipate the chemistry, but does
nothing to remove the stressor. Modern
life is full of such disparities between
the way our animal self would
'naturally' react, and how we have
learned to act within a society
(Sapolsk'y 1990).
Psychotherapy has sought to deal
with the anxieties and neuroses that
build up around these pattens of
suppression. Manual therapy has as
well, but pays less attention to the
'story' or content of the neurosis,
concentrating instead on the somatic
context, which expresses itself in
habitual posture, styles of movement,
and pattens of expression. Bridging
toward the body from Gestalt Therapy,
body-centered psychotherapeutic
techniques, such as the Hakomi, the
Rosen Method, or Somatic
Experiencing, work with the somatic
aspects of psychological disturbance
and trauma resolution (Kurtz 1990,
Rosen 1991, Levine 1997).
Most of these 'bioenergetic'
approaches are indebted to Wilhelm
Reich and his followers, such as
Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos
(Reich 1949, Lowen), for identifying
the basic body pattens of response to
the disparity between the inner and
outer world. Keleman took the idea
one step further by positing how the
generalized response pattens came out
of the changing tonus and shape of
the various tubular structures within
the body (Keleman 1985). Both

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Kinesthetic dystonia

Fig. 2 Bad full flexion pose with

'X'-chest behind the spine.

Fig. 1

Full flexion pose.

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Fig. 3

Good hyperextension pose.

Fig. 4 'Bad' hyperextension pose

with 'X' - neck over extended.

Fig. 5

Integrated sitting.

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Kinesthetic dystonia
further research and more social
dialogue are needed in this domain. We
require research to understand more
completely the interaction among the
central nervous system, the autonomic
system, the hormonal/neuropeptide
'wash' of all systems, and psychoneuro-immunology (Pert 1997).
Ongoing social dialogues are
underway already on what constitutes
abuse, on gender differences, and
on the productive expression of
emotion.
Through close observation of the
signs of autonomic activity - pupil
dilation, skin colour changes,
adrenergic and cholinergic sweating,
peristalsis, breathing pattern, etc. - a
bodyworker can follow the course of
the sympathetic charge and discharge
without reference to the content of the
charge, in other words, without
reference to the 'story'. In this way,
bodyworkers and kinesthetic educators
can be helpful psychosomatically
without full psychological expertise,
simply through their ability to follow
and track the changing state of the
autonomic balance and resolution
within the client.
Could such a thing be taught? Can
we teach children to track their own
body process, so as to be able to spot
their own 'angst' and nip it in the bud,
temporarily control it as necessary, or
follow it down to its roots? Can young
people be taught to be emotionally
autopoietic?
A number of possible assists in this
direction come to mind. Apprising
students of the existence and
functioning of the underlying
unconscious autonomic responses
would be a start. If teenagers
understood erections as well as they
did condoms, we could avoid even
more STDs and unwanted pregnancies.
The understanding that unfinished
emotional/autonomic business often
involves an uncompleted motion was
valuable to Nate (see Part 3A of this
series, Myers 1999) as he assessed
what was unfinished in his encounter
with the bully.

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For students to recapitulate animal

movement gives an understanding of
our underlying physical, emotional.
and mental structure. The author often
spends a day with his adult students to
review the movements of life,
beginning with the expansion and
contraction of single-cell eukaryotes
up through the arboreal hanging of the
apes. Interacting with other students as
animals from various rungs on the
evolutionary ladder, students gain a
sense of aff-mity with their biological
history.
The ability to express emotions
fully and authentically is a dream for
most of us, and the teen years are
fertile ground for such suppression or
diversion of emotional energy. In
addition, there are at least as many
'normal' human responses as there are
animal types; the value is not to make
everyone respond in the same way to a
given emotional charge ('Thank you
for sharing'), but to open the way to
the authentic fulfillment of the organic
self. The ability to contact one's animal
self, even noticing a particular affinity
for one animal over another, is a useful
step toward making friends with the
animal within.

Maturity
Aside from the movements of the body
in space and the movements within the
body, there is a very slow but
tremendously important movement that
we bodyworkers have been known to
assist: the movement toward maturity
(Fig. 6). Everyone grows bigger, but
not everyone 'grows up'. This lack of
maturity has a Strong somatic
component, and can occur in the body
as a whole, or to just part of the body.
To give some illustrations, imagine a
boy of six lifting his arms straight up
over his head. Do you see his shoulder
blades sticking out to the side, the
inferior angle out beyond his ribs?
Probably you imagined it that way,
because that is how immature
shoulders work: the scapula tends to
move in an arc that stays with the

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humerus degree for degree. Now

imagine an adult doing the same thing:
most likely you imagine that the
scapula stays more in place on the back
of the ribs. In an adult, we expect the
humerus to move through three
degrees of arc for every one the
scapula moves through. If we see an
adult client coming through our doors
whose scapulae are tied to the humerus
'like a child,' we can surmise that
either: 1) an injury has linked the two,
perhaps through tightening of the
rotator cuff; or 2) the shoulders never
developed out of that childhood
pattern. They grew bigger, but they did
not mature.
Another example came to our door
recently: this client was a college
professor, brilliant and accomplished
in the academic realm. He was socially
less adept, being selfish, needy,
incapable in the larger world, so he had
cocooned himself in the protective
academic setting. He had a large round
head, a short and rounded (as opposed
to the more common elliptical adult)
torso, shortish limbs, and turned out
legs. When we stood him in front of a
mirror to do our customary structural
analysis, we realized that here was an
infant body. This man never grew out
of infancy in this movement toward
maturity. He still responded like an
infant to his surroundings, marrying a
maternal woman and sheltering himself
in an academic womb, still playing out
his infantile responses even as his brain
grappled with complex (and interesting
and useful) biological problems. The
ability to catch a body up on this
decades-long movement towards
maturity is a useful and unsung skill in
the bodyvork realm.
Like the inner pulsation of the
visceral organs, this motion is too slow
and subtle to be appreciated by its
subject. A more detailed appreciation
of the somatic maturation process in
our PE system would allow us to
recognize places in the body where the
developmental shoe has been nailed to
the floor, so that it can be released
before it becomes irreparable. In our

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Myers
to develop through cultivating, instead
o f systematically deadening, our
kinesthetic talents.

,!

Non-verbal c o m m u n i c a t i o n

Fig. 6 One of the most interesting contributions bodywork can make to a new physical
education is in the realm of maturational development. A, B & C show what can be
accomplished: (A) Reginald before any bodywork, 03) after 10 sessions ofbodywork (under
the direction of Dr Ida Roll), and (C) the right shows Reginald 1 year later with no further
bodywork. The only modification in the pictures is to keep them the same size, while
Reginald presumably grew.
In (A), Reginald shows a typical postural response of an anteriorly-tilted pelvis, a
posteriorly-tilted rib cage, and an anterior neck, among other things. In 03), the post-Rolfing
picture, he is demonstrably straighter, but not demonstrably better off. (In fact, one person,
viewing these two pictures, said, 'you took away his naturalness and just gave him a weedywhite-boy posture! What good is that?) The third picture (C), however, tells a different story.
With the weight of the shoulder girdle resting comfortably on the rib cage instead of hangfiag
off behind it, the chest and the chest muscles are free to develop, so Reginald fills out,
deepens, and looks a different boy. Our thesis is that Reginald, left to himself, would not
have developed into the boy on the right in a year, but the boy in the middle could (and did).
After the initial work, 'compound essence of time' was the only medicine necessary to do
the job.
Being able to recognize such restrictions and realize such potentialities will be the job of
both bodyworkers and physical educators in the coming century. (Reproduced with the kind
permission of Robert Toporek and The Children's Project.)

experience, such work requires very

precise and often body-wide work, and
may not lend itself to educational
methods, other than the usual rough
and tumble o f hormones and
experience that produces some
semblance o f maturity in all o f us.
Recognition o f the somatic dimension
o f maturity, however, would make

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referral to a bodywork 'specialist' a

more common event.

Kinesthetic sensitivity
In this category goes all the cognitive
teaching about the kinesthetic sense, o f
how we sense ourselves and others,
and what new skills we might be able

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So much emphasis is put on verbal

communication in our schools, and so
little on non-verbal communication.
Yet the non-verbal underlies the verbal
every time, and usually outdistances it
in the amount of information
conveyed. In working with couples, the
author often asks one spouse to nonverbally cue the other spouse to do
something simple, e.g., 'Without
talking, get her to get out o f the chair
and lie down on the other side o f the
room.' How they go about it - both the
guider and the guided - reveals the
dynamics of the relationship more
clearly and quickly than any verbal
statement would do. Often, as well, one
can work in this non-verbal arena
without awakening all the
defensiveness that usually comes up in
verbal exchanges. Kinesthetic
education can sneak in under the radar.
Children are generally very
responsive when taught aspects o f nonverbal communication. Since so much
o f non-verbal communication is
kinesthetic, we are really proposing
making a curriculum out of kinesthetic
skills. Since, as we have noted before,
kinesthetic information can be
transduced into behaviour 30 times
faster than visual information, and
many thousands o f times faster than
audio information, leaving it out o f our
curriculum is a waste. Imagine that
you are trying to learn a new skill,
from hammering, to getting on your
own shirt the first time, a dance, or
any physical skill. Someone could tell
you about it, show you how to do it, or
actually move your body through the
motions involved. How do you think
you will pick up the skill the fastest?
Theatre exercises and other games
abound for teaching children o f all
ages the rudiments o f non-verbal
information, and how to read nonverbal cues. The techniques o f mime

APRIL1999

Kinesthetic dystonia
contain a rich set of conventions for
non-verbal communication. The
simple exercise of having children play
with an imaginary ball, maintaining the
concentration to see, feel, and follow
the invisible ball simply through the
movements of others, yields amazing
results of group connection through
non-verbal interaction.

Wide vocabulary of touch

Though not everyone will grow up to
love or practice hands-on work, a
vocabulary of touch is as basic to
general education as a visual,
mathematic, or linguistic vocabulary.
Knowing how different types of touch
feel, both as practitioner and recipient,
would in one swoop change the 'feel'
of an entire generation of
schoolchildren. Short playshops in
learning to 'wobble' each other fi la
Trager, how to safely and efficiently
guide each other in movement fi la
Touch-in-Parenting, how to simply
place the hands and see what there is to
feel ~ la ReiN, how to use touch to
calm the over-excited, how to restore or
ease simple sports-related problems,
even how to do basic corrective
manipulations on each other/L la
osteopathy - all of these are skills that
are teachable incrementally, without
much equipment, and in group
situations.
Basic skills such as contact, body
use, boundary and container issues all the factors around touch that come
up in bodywork schools - could be
conveyed to the student population.
Some students would take to these
exercises like a duck to water, others
might resent the whole thing and prefer
'Shop' or trigonometry, but it would do
them no harm to be exposed to skillful
touch. The question is rather what
harm is being done currently in not
exposing our students to simple touch.
One basic result is a touch-starved
population entering adolescence.
Another result is a generation of
teachers urged to refrain from touching
their students, lest their gesture be

misunderstood. With so few in the

society exposed to skilled touch,
confusion abounds between sexuality,
sensuality, and simple essential
contact.
It is a standard lament that we
require licenses for driving an
automobile, but none for parents.
Making sure that all secondary school
graduates had at least some grounding
in the basics of touch would not
eliminate any jobs for hands-on
therapists (quite the contrary, we
expect), but would help to develop
good parenting skills.

Sensitivity and intuition: the

body as antenna
From Reiki, Shiatsu, and a host of
other Oriental (and a few Occidental)
approaches comes the idea of tuning
the body's intuitional sensitivity. We
tend to train children to tune out
hunches in favour of facts. Bodywork
teaches us to be exquisitely sensitive to
fleeting and transient breezes that may
signal the storms to come. Though the
components of intuitional knowledge
have yet to be categorized, it is
empirically clear to many that the
kinesthetic, especially the
interoceptive, sense forms a large part
of the basis for intuition. Our language
is full of such indications: 'I felt it in
my bones', 'It was a gut reaction', or
'My blood ran cold just to look at
him'.
The writings of Dr James Oschman
lead us toward considering the body,
especially the fascial net, as antenna,
and bodywork as a way of 'tuning' that
antenna to different or more refined
frequencies (Oschman 1997).
Reducing the kinesthetic 'noise' to
which we are subjected in our culture,
returning to quietude and the natural
world where possible, allows us to tune
in to the more subtle signals our body
can give us about ourselves and the
world around us. Are humans capable
of finding magnetic north without a
compass? Of knowing what time it is
without a watch? Of controlling

ovulation or other seemingly automatic

functions? Anecdotes abound,but what
are 'normal' human talents? How can
we know when almost all humans are
surrounded by electronic and literal
noise at every juncture?
It is against the interests of an
industrial society to train its children to
be too sensitive, lest they become too
sensitive to fit into the machinery of
production, or equally into the
machinery of consumption. The
opposite begins to apply as we move
into the post-industrial (we have,
following Thomas Berry, named it the
Eeozoic) era. Sensitivity will become
the mainspring of human endeavour in
the ensuing decades, and this is the
educational gap we must close.
Children can be trained to be extra
sensitive to the slightest changes of
movement, as for instance in the
sensory awareness exercises of
Charlotte Selver (Brooks 1974).
Traditional ensemble theatre exercises,
such as those of Viola Spolin (1963),
can be easily applied to school
situations to increase sensitivity. For
example, the author has found the
following exercise fits both
professional and young audiences:
select one person to be the 'sculpture',
and pair off the rest of the group. One
member of each pair puts on a
blindfold, this is the 'sculptor'. The
other member of the pair is the 'clay'
(for groups of more than 12 or so,
create two 'sculptures'). Arrange the
'sculpture' into a complex but
sustainable position; the person must
stay in exactly that position for 5-10
minutes. The 'clay' person leads the
'sculptor' to the sculpture, and the
sculptor registers the position of the
sculpture only through kinesthetic feel.
The sculptor then takes his clay a little
bit away, and tries to reproduce the
sculpture as exactly as possible in the
clay. This must be done totally nonverbally, the sculptor is not allowed to
'talk' the clay into position, nor can the
clay offer verbal advice to the sculptor.
The sculptor can be led back to the
original sculpture for a second feel,

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Myers
and then return to refme the position of
the clay.
When the sculptor is finished, he or
she can remove the blindfold and
compare the original with the 'copy'.
Be sure to call attention to small details
such as hand or elbow position, medial
or lateral rotation of the shoulder,
spinal position. A roomful of these
sculptures can often present quite a
variety of interpretations of the
original. After everyone has admired
and critiqued everyone else's work, the
sculpture and all the clay are gratefully
allowed to move. Reverse roles and
repeat.
Additionally, didactic and scientific
knowledge is no enemy to sensitivity.
It is difficult to be sensitive about
something of which you have no
picture. Especially for dominantly
visual people, but for everyone to some
degree, a filled-in three-dimensional
grasp of the body allows students to be
more cognizant of their internal
process. We have already mentioned
the sensitizing effect of building the
muscles in clay onto the skeletal frame
of Zahourek's Maniken (Myers 1999).
Before being introduced to Barral's
Visceral Manipulation work (1997),
the author had no sense, beyond a
general sloshing weight, of his organs
and their attachments. Now, with a
much clearer picture of how the organs
are attached, it is much easier to
appreciate interoceptively how they
move, and how they pull on the
locomotor structure as spatial position
changes.

The pain-free body

Can anyone doubt that if we succeed in
bringing these kinds of values into the
educational system that we can bring
about the goal of all our individual
work, the pain-free body? The painfree soma is free to sense the entire
spectrum of what the world has to
offer, to process it with the widest
possible set of options, and to respond
with the subtlest or most powerful
actions. An educational system that

dealt more thoroughly with the

kinesthetic system would lighten the
burden of pain and its attendant fatigue
and apathy.
The Eskimos have many words for
'snow'; we need more words for pain.
Pain entering the body provides a
warning. Pain stored in the body is
sometimes felt as pain, but more often
breeds a numbness that is felt only as
fatigue or limitation. Pain leaving the
body, as occurs in NeuroMuscular
Therapy, Rolfmg, Yoga, or other
therapeutic manipulations, is shunned
by many as counter-productive, while
in fact a momentary discomfort can be
followed by pain-free inhabitance of a
forgotten part of the body. While no
programme can begin to remove pain
or suffering from human experience,
needless pain is a luxury we can well
do without. Training the kinesthetic
sense with even a tenth of the energy
we put into teaching the visual and
auditory senses would be well
rewarded by surcease from the selflimiting cul-de-sac to which the end of
the industrial era has brought us.

Summary
The author welcomes comment on this
initial attempt to set an agenda on
applying manual therapeutic principles
to Physical Education. New skills,
tools, and insights (as well as revived
ancient techniques) have developed
within this field that have wide
educational application. Furthermore,
these tools are particularly adapted to
the needs of the coming century.
Opportunities abound for applying
these insights educationally to more
general populations than have been
reached so far by individual
practitioners doing one-on-one work in
middle-to-upper class venues.
As 'Kinesthetic Dystonia' comes to
be recognized as a societal
misapplication of education, a
synthesis of diverse bodywork and
movement approaches will be applied
to combat it. All the work we have
done to date is valuable empirical

J O U R N A L OF B O D Y W O R K A N D M O V E M E N T

research; may we make the most of this

opportunity for its wider application.

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